{"id":2155,"date":"2019-07-07T11:13:20","date_gmt":"2019-07-07T11:13:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/?p=2155"},"modified":"2019-07-07T11:30:58","modified_gmt":"2019-07-07T11:30:58","slug":"design-council-and-the-ou-design-group","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/design-council-and-the-ou-design-group\/","title":{"rendered":"Design Council and the OU Design Group"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The Design Council visited the OU last week to talk about their ongoing work on the Design Economy.<\/p>\n

This work overlaps with our own on design identities and students – rather than asking \u2018what is design?\u2019 (and getting into the usual trouble\u2026), it can be useful to ask \u201cWhat are designers doing?\u201d and \u201cWho is doing design?\u201d<\/p>\n

For both questions, the answers are not completely straightforward. Peter Lloyd (production Chair for the first version of U101) wrote about how design graduates are not necessarily doing the exact named design degree they studied (Lloyd, 2011).<\/p>\n

Similarly, the Design Council research and work shows how design support and other jobs could be considered more as design roles when you examine the skills and abilities required.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Both of these situations are particularly true for OU design students – some have no intention of becoming traditional designers (but want to develop and broaden their creative and professional skills), whilst others may start out wanting a traditional design degree but realise that this may not be as personally valuable as they first thought.<\/p>\n

The key in both situations is that it\u2019s our students who create this perception and research shows that distance design students are pretty good at this (Lanig, In Press). What we need to do is get even better at providing opportunities to do this in more ways and across diverse topic areas.<\/p>\n

There is something different about what we offer as design education and there is something different about what our students want and need.<\/p>\n

Between these two \u2018differents\u2019 there is a great opportunity to co-create what an OU design graduate \u2018is\u2019 – and (more importantly) what it may become after graduation (or even if there should be graduation\u2026)<\/p>\n

Anyway, one of the ideas we\u2019ve been working on was the creation of new design personas and titles: design roles that already kind of exist but nobody really gives them a name. Or they\u2019re roles that aren\u2019t normally associated with design and aren\u2019t given the credit they\u2019re due. Or they might even be personas that don\u2019t exist yet – the job YouTuber didn\u2019t exist when I was a young architecture student\u2026<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

So here are a few to start your off – which ones do you recognise? What ones would you add?<\/p>\n

Design Activist<\/strong> – someone wanting to do something different; to make a change in a creative and purposeful way; who wants to develop the skills and abilities to go about this.
\nDesign Wanderer<\/strong> – someone who doesn\u2019t really know what they want but they know that they have something valuable to contribute
\nDesign Organiser<\/strong> – if you\u2019re lucky, you might work on a project or in a job that has a design organiser – someone who uses creative design to actually organise and manage teams to achieve incredible things. You know it when you see\u2026.
\nDesign Team Member<\/strong> – that \u2018creative\u2019 person in the office that wants their creative and team building skills to be recognised – not just for them to be the person that\u2019s always coming up with \u2018wacky ideas\u2019<\/p>\n

Design Ecologist
\nDesign Client
\nDesign Economist<\/strong>
\nDesign Manager<\/strong>
\nDesign Communicator<\/strong>
\nDesign Ethicist<\/strong><\/p>\n

Any others?<\/p>\n

References<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n
Lloyd, P. (2011) \u2018Does Design Education Always Produce Designers?\u2019, Conference for the International Association of Colleges for Art, Design and Media (CUMULUS)<\/i>, vol. Paris.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Design Council visited the OU last week to talk about their ongoing work on the Design Economy. This work overlaps with our own on design identities and students – rather than asking \u2018what is design?\u2019 (and getting into the usual trouble\u2026), it can be useful to ask \u201cWhat are designers doing?\u201d and \u201cWho is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":2156,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[73,35],"class_list":["post-2155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-design-comment","tag-design-economy","tag-design-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2155"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2155\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2163,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2155\/revisions\/2163"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.open.ac.uk\/blogs\/design\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}